Data is collected, organized, and processed for virtually every transaction and communication that occurs in today's global economy. The integrity of this information (e.g., the authenticity and/or security of a message) has become important to enterprises and individuals. Consequently, a variety of techniques for securing and replicating information exist, including information backup processes to protect against disk failure and other kinds of catastrophic data loss. Such techniques include taking “snapshots” or making copies of data on a periodic basis, which can give rise to race conditions when a write request occurs at or nearly the same time as a snapshot is taken within a group of nodes.